Role: Dungeon fortune-teller
An old woman found caged in the flooded dungeon where the party awoke in chains after Strahd’s toast, Esmeralda read each of their fortunes with a tarot deck once they were freed — warning of several possible paths out of the castle, and of one especially dangerous but decisive path: recovering three artifacts capable of ending Strahd’s power for good. She warned midnight was coming and Strahd would follow. Moments after her reading, she crumbled into an old skeleton still clutching the tarot deck, which the party looted along with a rib bone and the cards themselves.